Sloan-Kettering

About Abba Kovner

Abba Kovner was born in 1918 in Sebastopol. Committed to Zionism from boyhood, Kovner was an advocate of armed resistance during World War II, famously urging his comrades in the Vilna ghetto not to go "like sheep to the slaughter," but to stand and fight. Kovner thus became a key leader in the United Partisan Organization, which carried out sabotage operations against the German army, first from the ghetto and later from the Baltic forest. After liberation, he helped take Jews from Eastern and Central Europe into Palestine for resettlement. Kovner and his wife, Vitka, also a resistance leader, eventually settled on Kibbutz Ein ha-Horesh. After taking part in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, Kovner became a writer of both poetry and prose, winning the Israeli Prize for Literature in 1970. A founder of the Moreshet Holocaust Institute and the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, Kovner died in 1987.

Praise

“A work of self-commemoration that takes the side of continuing existence . . . A book written from the dark side of alienation . . . it shimmers with the dark radiance—the stark beauty—of last things.”
—Edward Hirsch, The New York Times Book Review

“Moving . . . In these plainspoken poems . . . Kovner meditates on the possibility of heroism in the face of illness.”
—The New Yorker

"Abba Kovner wrote about his impending death with a broken heart—a heart laid open to longing, to memory, to love, to the ugly details of cancer treatment. The Sloan-Kettering Poems are unsentimentally, passionately, furiously alive."
—Anita Diamant (author of Saying Kaddish, The Red Tent, and Good Harbor)

"Here is a work of art, masterfully presented."
—A.B. Yehoshua

"Abba Kovner was one of the greatest poet-fighters in the Jewish tradition. I grew up in his light, as did many of those of my generation. He was a hero to us all, and a splendid poet. To read, hear, experience the intimacy of his last months—that is something very powerful."
—Chaim Potok

"These are beautiful, stern, lacerating poems written by a genuine hero as he was dying of cancer. They detail his struggle to bear witness to the destruction of his body and the perseverance of his will and identity. It is a terrifying but superb legacy he has given us."
—Marge Piercy

"In this deeply moving collection, Kovner shows the same greatness of spirit in confronting cancer that he showed in confronting Nazis in the Vilna ghetto."
—Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People